Engage, embrace, extinguish

This is not the first time that Redmond company has seen it fit to take a well-worn and engineered solution running on Linux (or even FreeBSD) and put their OS on it. I recall a company here in Singapore called earth9 which was a Linux business from the beginning and when they had a call from MS Singapore to do some work, MS Singapore wanted them to switch out of Linux to their OS and be a case study. That was I believe in 2002 or so. 7 year on, that still continues.

Today we have OpenOffice.org 3.1 gets released. In the meantime, the proprietary product from Redmond claims to be able to wirte ODF format, but fails. Pity. Money corrupts, but MS Tax Dollars corrupts absolutely.

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3 thoughts on “Engage, embrace, extinguish”

I agree, I have seen it many times. But it is still not Black and White, so Microsoft is still not automatic evil nor Red Hat good. At least not for me.🙂
If I have to choose.. well then better Red Hat.

Btw this is a better example.. and nobody ever noticed it.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Navision
A solution that worked fine with mysql and other databases. Now it works best with only Microsoft products.
Its not only open source that suffers.
It limits choice…

Thanks for your comments. Not sure what you meant by “nor Red Hat good”. Red Hat as a business tries to have that fine balance of being a commercial entity and being a community champion. Commercial open source is what Red Hat is all about and while that helps derive economic benefits for both Red Hat and customers of Red Hat’s solutions, Red Hat has to also ensure that the bigger FOSS community is flourishing and growing. The sustenance of Red Hat is from the FOSS community. If you contrast that with the Redmond model, they feel that they can hire all of the best engineers in the world and get them to produce. Time and time again it has been shown that the best engineers and innovations happen outside the corporation. Red Hat fully understands that and works in that frame of mind. That, imho, is how Red Hat does good. Good for not only the financial shareholders of Red Hat stock, but also, the good folks who work in that organization and by extension the FOSS community.
Redmond, sad to note, has not found it and probably never will. When I tweeted about “sending a bunch of openoffice.org 3.1 CDs to the Microsoft Singapore office”, the reply was “do send them over – need to keep them off the streets” – search for @osrin and @harishpillay tweets on May 7/8 2009.